Monday 8 April 2002

Pic of the day: I am not sure when people started to imagine spirits as see-through people. It may be the original for all I know. But that's not how I use the word. (Except in such cases as Dark Age of Camelot.)

Spirits, or perhaps not

I'm not so sure about spirits. I don't mean the drinkable spirits; those are easy enough. I mean the spiritual spirits. Do they even exist? My experience says yes. But my experience also says that the sun rises in the east. We all know it doesn't; it's the Earth that rotates. Yet we cannot quite shake the illusion that the sun rises and sets. And it is convenient; all know what we mean and accept it without question. The truth is somewhat more complicated, even when we know it. And in spiritual matters, we probably don't understand even the basics.

I am thinking of my muse, or the narrator voice in my head, continuing to tell me chapter 11 of my ongoing fantasy novel. Frankly, I am not so very enamored of this story anymore. My attempts at writing from a vaguely lustful teenage perspective wearies me. I realize now how much I like being pure. Not that I actually am pure, but at least not striving for impurity. Meh. It is good to be able to meet a woman's eyes and not worry about my sight straying to her chest. It is good to have female (not to mention male) friends and not worrying that I might want them for carnal pleasure at some point. I may not be all that holy and pure and chaste, but there is stuff I wouldn't actually do outside marriage. (And stuff I wouldn't do even in marriage, probably, if I could reasonably avoid it. Meep.)

But this muse, this narrative voice, it is not quite identical to me. It tells me ideas that I did not know I had. I have the final say, but often I am presented with images or ideas that I don't feel like I could have done better myself. Or even quite that well. It also seems more addicted to attention than I am. Less mature but more creative.

***

I know that psychologically, it is just a division of labor within my brain. But the idea that this might be a kind of spirit vaguely disturbs me. I can say for sure that it's not the Holy Ghost at least. On the bright side, it does not possess me or even try to. I can send it away whenever I want, and it will stay away until I have the time and interest to look at the story again. At least for the time being. But if my main spirit was weakened, could I trust this to not try to take me over? I like to think so, but what do I know?

The old Romans thought that outstanding people, such as great artists, had a spirit helper. This was called a genius, and from this comes our word for the particularly gifted. It was also thought that the genius would often follow a family, assisting its members through several generations. Unlike the muses of Greek mythology, this was a more local thing. There was not one genius for all composers, for instance. Each, or possibly each family of such artists, had their own. This is strikingly similar to the Norse concept of a follow spirit, I think they were called "fylgja" in old Norse. These were minor spirits that followed a place, or a person, or a family. They were fairly powerful within their limited domain, but not outside it. And of course we have the concept of the guardian angel, but this is a bit different again. Somehow I cannot imagine guardian angels coming up with fictional stories, anyway.

There seems to be a persistent belief that we are not quite alone, that we have invisible spirit helpers (or, for some unfortunate people, invisible spirit enemies) that follow us around. In the past, people took these things quite literally. Today it is more of a poetic expression. But apart from that, how much has really changed? Do we really understand how these things work? We can put labels on them: C.G. Jung identified spirits as complexes in the collective subconscious, while souls were complexes in the personal subconscious. By that standard, perhaps my muse is a soul rather than a spirit. Somehow that fails to cheer me up intensely.